Complete Virtual Platform

Allocation: Elastic Pooling of Resources

To build a true private cloud, automated workload balancing within shared pools of resources delivers optimized resource usage. This ensures that companies get full resource utilization and the highest availability as needed by application and service loads.

Microsoft Dynamic Optimization or PRO Tips (requires System Center Operations Manager) and Citrix’s dynamic workload balancing do not come close to matching the maturity and robustness of VMware DRS. The logic that drives Dynamic Optimization is separate from the logic that drives anti-affinity rules, meaning Microsoft’s Dynamic Optimization software ignores these settings. Similarly, the heuristics in Citrix’s workload balancing is also unproven and does not work well with its recently released dynamic memory capability.

With [VMware] DRS, we are able to free up the VI team so they can work on other projects.

Therefore, IT administrators trying to use Microsoft or Citrix’s offering end up having to do a lot of manual monitoring to ensure those systems are performing load balancing as they should, which ultimately pulls IT administrators away from other higher value work and results in lower IT administrator productivity.

In conjunction with VMware DRS, VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch™ and vCloud Networking and Security™ are also critical for enabling elastic pools of resources. vNetwork Distributed Switch provides a centralized point of control for cluster level networking and moves beyond per host network configuration in virtual environments. vCloud Networking and Security enables you to run your applications efficiently within a shared computing resource pool, while still maintaining trust and network segmentation of users and sensitive data. Neither Microsoft nor Citrix have anything comparable.

Features

VMware vSphere 5.1

Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V (beta)

Citrix XenServer 6

Maintenance Mode for Servers

Consistently Applied Affinity and Anti-Affinity Rules

Maintain Network Security Settings When VMs Live Migrate to Another Host

Enforce Network Security Settings at VM-level, Instead of at Host-level

Ability to set per-VM shares and priorities on shared storage I/O bandwidth

Ability to set per-VM shares and priorities on shared network I/O bandwidth